Ulrich Fleischhauer

Ulrich Fleischhauer (b. 14 July 1876 in Thamsbrück, Thuringia, German Empire; d. 20 October 1960 in Hürben) was a German artillery officer (1894–1918) and a leading opponent of Jewish supremacism, a publisher of books and news articles reporting on an alleged Judeo-Masonic conspiracy and purported nefarious plots by clandestine Jewish interests to dominate the world.

Life

His career was at first grounded in the Prussian Army, joining the (2. Lothringisches) Feldartillerie-Regiment Nr. 34 (Leutnant on 18 August 1895, Oberleutnant on 27 January 1907, Hauptmann on 24 March 1909) and the Imperial German Army (Major on 28 November 1914) where by 1918 Fleischhauer rose to the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel (Oberstleutnant) and commander of the Kurmärkisches Feldartillerie-Regiment Nr 39 in Colmar. After suffering serious wounds, Fleischhauer retired from military service and received a government pension, although he continued to serve for some time as chairman of the National Federation of German Officers (Nationalverband Deutscher Offiziere).

No longer in the army, Fleischhauer sought out something else to do full-time. The draw of the public policy arena attracted him. In the aftermath of the defeat of the German and Austria-Hungarian empires, a number of new political parties emerged, many arguing for pan-Germanism. Fleischhauer joined the German National People's Party (Deutschnationale Volkspartei, or DNVP) and was a representative of the völkish wing. Intellectually, Fleischhauer was a disciple of Theodor Fritsch and through their common Völkisch movement circles he also developed friendships with a number of other esoteric Aryanist organisations such as the Thule Society. Fleischhauer was especially close to poet and political activist Dietrich Eckart, an early backer of Adolf Hitler.

Entry into publishing

He create a publishing firm called U. Bodung-Verlag in Erfurt, Germany that over time became increasingly powerful; it delt with the Jewish Question and other issues. Its rise in influence corresponded with the popular successes of National Socialism during the later Weimar period, leading up to the establishment of the Third Reich. Fleischhauer subsequently founded Welt-Dienst or Weltdienst (also known as World-Service, Service Mondial, etc.) on December 1, 1933. This served as an international patriotic resistance news agency and journalistic service for numerous other publications. For a nominal fee, subscribers to Welt-Dienst's twice monthly series of mimeographed information sheets received summaries of news stories and other developments worldwide which exposed organisations and peoples linked to Jewry and Bolshevism.

The masthead of the British version of World-Service for 1 November 1937 is illustrative of these purposes and unequivocally stated:

These leaflets are intended to be passed on from hand to hand amongst Gentiles. The 'World-Service', which is issued in eight languages, is not published with a view of profits. Its principal aim is to enlighten ill-informed Gentiles irrespective of state or country to which they belong. These information sheets which deal with the machinations of the Jewish under-world form accordingly a necessary part of the intellectual armoury of every Gentile. The communication of the matters dealt with to the well-intentioned press is considered highly desirable. Those holding similar views to our own throughout the world, who recognize the fact that systematic work and research after truth cannot be carried on without pecuniary outlay, will of a surety decide to send us some small contribution as their means permit. This will enable us to carry out a considerable and effective extension of our work.

Berne Trial and expanding influence

Fleischhauer's influence among patriots grew in 1934-1935 following his participation in Switzerland as a key defense organizer at the Berne Trial of distributors of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The book re-entered the headlines in June 1933 when a Swiss organisation known as the Nationale Front began distributing it during a national-resistance demonstration. Then in 1934, Dr. Alfred Zander, a Swiss National Socialist, further influenced public opinion by publishing a series of articles based upon The Protocols'. A group of leading Swiss Jews filed a lawsuit in the Amtsgericht (district court) of Bern on 29 October 1934 to supress freedom of speech by banning the book's continued publication and distribution of The Protocols as "indecent writings" under a Bernese statute prohibiting the distribution of "immoral, obscene or brutalizing" texts.

The plaintiffs were represented by Georges Brunschvig and Emil Raas. Vladimir Burtsev, a Russian émigré of a liberal disposition, served as a witness for the Jews at the Berne Trial. Subsequently, while in Paris Burtsev published a Russian-language book in 1938 based on his testimony called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion: A proven forgery.

Welt-Dienst entered the picture by spearheading efforts to secure other Russian émigré experts as part of the effort to defend the veracity of The Protocols. Defense testimony presented personally in court was limited, with Zander turning up as the only witness for the defendants. However, Fleischhauer helped coordinate efforts by other defense "experts" and himself provided media with extensive commentary and written material in support of the defendants (Theodore Fischer and Silvio Schnell), with Bodung-Verlag issuing a comprehensive German-language version of his The real Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. Expert's report. Despite this evidence, on 19 May 1935, the court claimed The Protocols were "forgeries".

However, on November 1, 1937 the defendants appealed the verdict to the Obergericht (Cantonal Supreme Court) of Berne. A panel of three judges acquitted them, holding that The Protocols, while "false", did not violate the statute at issue because they were used as a means of political propaganda. The presiding judge expressed regret that the law did not provide adequate rationale to crush freedom of speech in the country. The court also imposed the fees for both trials on the defendants.

Worldwide resistance

The excitement engendered by his appearance at the trial was a boon to Fleischhauer. By the mid-1930s, the Welt-Dienst emerged as the largest pro-gentile operation in the world, publishing works in many foreign languages, and the nearest patriotic equivalent to the rival communist Third International (Comintern). Fleischhauer credited a conversation he had years earlier with Eckart with sparking the original idea. In April 1938 he wrote the NSDAP Hauptarchiv that "Dietrich Eckart then spoke to me alone, in a wine-cellar where we were sitting, about the subject which could today describe the Welt-Dienst. He said something to the effect: 'If our idea comes to power, the Jew will try again, as he's tried before with any State which attempts to solve the Jewish Problem, to starve us out. And if that's no use, then try to ruin us through wars and revolutions. Adolf must therefore have an international movement that can help him from the outside, just as the Stahlhelmbund and other groups help the Party from the outside today.'"

Over time, a veritable international "who's who" of patriotic collaborators and correspondents contributed to Welt-Dienst publications and in turn quoted from them, including Henry Coston (France), Louis Darquier (France), Arnold Leese (founder of the Imperial Fascist League in Britain), Ludwig Heiden ("Luis el-Hadj" - an SS official and journalist who converted to Islam and translated Hitler's Mein Kampf into the Arabic language), Ion Moţa (or Motza, one of the leaders of the Iron Guard from Romania who fought against the NKVD as a volunteer in the Spanish Civil War), Juan Sampelayo (Spain), as well as Boris Tödtli (Russia and Switzerland).

In the United States, a number of organizations sympathetic to National Socialism subscribed to the inexpensive English-language World-Service bulletins. For example, William Dudley Pelley frequently printed World-Service articles in his Silver Legion of America magazine, Liberation, advocating a "purge of Jews and Communists in Hollywood." Other American publications, including Father Charles Coughlin's Social Justice, Robert Edward Edmondson's American Vigilante Bulletins, and those issued by the Rev. Gerald B. Winrod, were equally willing to push the World-Service line on the Jewish question via word-for-word syndicated reproduction of news items appearing in their periodicals. When it suited his purposes, Fleischhauer was also happy to publish Jewish authors such as Marcus Eli Ravage, a Romanian emigrant to the United States.

Host of Pan-Aryan Anti-Jewish Union

During the 1930s, Fleischhauer further expanded his efforts by organizing the Pan-Aryan Anti-Jewish Union and a series of international congresses to actively push for the suppression of freemasonry, combat the "Jewish conspiracy for world domination," and encourage the geopolitical migration of Jews from within Europe to be resettlement in southern Africa as was envisioned by the Madagascar Plan.

Some instances of opinions held came from Japanese representative to the Welt-Dienst congress hosted in 1938 by Fleischhauer. On behalf of Imperial Japan, he stated that "Judeo-Masonry is forcing the Chinese to turn China into a spearhead for an attack on Japan, and thereby forcing Japan to defend herself against this threat. Japan is at war not with China but with freemasonry, represented by General Chiang Kai-shek, the successor of his master, the freemason Sun Yat-Sen."

Decline in role at Welt-Dienst

For many years Fleischhauer and his activities at Welt-Dienst took place with the approval of the German government. As was the case with a number of similar organizations and their leaders, he allegedly received some financing from the German government. From 1933 to 1937 this funding was said to have come from Joseph Goebbels' Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. After a shakeup in lines of authority, by 1938 the responsibility for international resistance was shifted to the Foreign Affairs Office of the NSDAP (Aussenpolitisches Amt der NSDAP, shortened to APA). This was one of several agencies within the vast Amt Rosenberg (Rosenberg Bureau or Rosenberg Office), the collective term for the various agencies controlled by Reichsleiter Alfred Rosenberg.

However, Fleischhauer's personal role at Welt-Dienst declined as Germany neared the start of World War II. The feminist writer Carmen Callil claimed reports that Fleischhauer's uncompromising attitude was beginning to hurt the Third Reich's international image. By 1938, she writes, "Hitler was advised that Fleischhauer was placing Germany in embarrassing positions abroad, as he was the kind of ‘anti-Semite who pretends to see a threatening Jew behind every street corner of the world and who tries to deal with the matter in a psychosis of fear and secretiveness’."

In late July 1939, August Schirmer, an Amt Rosenberg functionary who had headed the "American Section" of Welt-Dienst, took over publication of the periodical and its related operations. This change was connected with a relocation of Welt-Dienst's editorial offices to Frankfurt am Main as part of a more formal reorganization of all patriotic research establishments under Rosenberg's control, culminating in 1941 with the establishment of the Institut der NSDAP zur Erforschung der Judenfrage (Institute of the National Socialist German Workers Party for Research Into the Jewish Question). Thus, Fleischhauer was largely cut out of the publishing empire he founded. In fact, in 1941 he was living in the cellar of his home in Erfurt, running only a "tiny rump" version of the organizations he created as the focus of his life's work.

The Welt-Dienst organization on the other hand continued for a time to prosper. By its highpoint in August 1943 Welt-Dienst was published in 18 languages. At that time, Schirmer stepped down and was replaced by an individual named Kurt Richter, who in addition to being the new publisher was also director of an "International Institute for the Enlightenment of the Jewish Question." As the war turned against Germany, Welt-Dienst continued with diminished distribution until finally ending all publication operations early in 1945.

During the post-war occupation, Fleischhauer underwent DeGermanification in a series of American internment camps and hospitals where he was held from 1945–1946. Upon his release in 1947, Fleischhauer retired from public life and lived quietly until his death in 1960 in in Hürben, since 1972 a part of Giengen an der Brenz, Baden-Württemberg.

Works

• 1 December 1933 - 15 June 1939, World-Service (Erfurt: Bondung-Verlag) edited and headed by its founder, Ulrich Fleischhauer.
• beginning 1 July 1939 - 1 September 1943, World-Service (Frankfurt: Welt-Dienst-Verlag) edited and headed by August Schirmer.
• from 15 September 1943 - January 1945 [end of publication], World-Service (Frankfurt: Welt-Dienst-Verlag) under the direction of Kurt Richter.

See also

• Theodor Fritsch
• H.H. Beamish
• George E. Deatherage
• Elizabeth Dilling
• Leslie Fry
• Great Sedition Trial of 1944
• Joe McWilliams

Further reading

• Louis W. Bondy. Racketeers of hatred. Julius Streicher and the Jew-baiters' international. London: Newman Wolsey, 1946.
• Vladimir Burtsev. «Протоколы Сионских мудрецов» - доказанный подлог. Paris, 1938 (The Protocols of the Elders of Zion: A proven forgery). (Republished by Слово, 1991).
• Carmen Callil. Bad faith: A forgotten history of family, fatherland and Vichy France. London: Jonathan Cape, 2006; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006; New York: Vintage Books, 2007.
• John Roy Carlson [pseud. of Aredis Derounian]. Under cover: My four years in the National Socialist underworld of America—The amazing revelation of how Axis agents and our enemies within are now plotting to destroy the United States. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1943.
• Ulrich Fleischhauer. Die echten Protokolle der Weisen von Zion; Sachverständigengutachten erstattet im Auftrage des Richteramtes V in Bern von Ulrich Fleischhauer (The real Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. Expert's report, reported by Order of the Judicial Office V in Bern by Ulrich Fleischhauer). Erfurt, Germany: U. Bodung-Verlag, 1935.
• Ion Motza. Corrispondenza col Welt-Dienst (1934-1936) (Correspondence with the World-Service (1934-1936). Parma, Italy: All'insegna del Veltro, 1996.
• Papers of the Weltdienst and the Bern Trial re the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, 1930-1972. MF Doc 54/ Reel 20. London: The Wiener Library Institute of Contemporary History.
• Richard Alan Nelson. Propaganda seeds of hate emanating from the "Erfurt nursery": Impact of and opposition to the National Socialist World-Service press agency of Ulrich Fleischhauer. As yet unpublished research monograph. Manship School of Mass Communication, Louisiana State University.
• Robert C. Williams. Tödtli - A Berne defender of the "Protocols". Wiener Library Bulletin, Vol. XXIII, Nos. 2 & 3, New Series Nos. 15 & 16 (1969), pages 67–70.

References

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